


Memories in Ash

by hellkitty



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-25
Updated: 2013-02-25
Packaged: 2017-12-03 15:17:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/699638
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellkitty/pseuds/hellkitty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>for Gen-Battle prompt: Dai Atlas, cities in dust. Prewar.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Memories in Ash

Dai Atlas was tired.  Beyond tired.  He was struts-deep exhausted, a sort of core-weariness that felt like a heavy grey fog pressing on his spark.  Another battle won; another city razed, the air around him dry and scorched, his own armor smudged with the grey dust of the burning city.  
  
The rifle was still hot in his hands, and he'd been fighting for so long that he could feel the change in weight from the ammunition, how light it now was compared to a few cycles ago.  
  
He could feel the weight of the ammunition clips on his hips, as well, weights holding him back as much as he counted on them saving his life, as he turned, surveying the crater before him. At one point it had been a residential block, full of moderate townhouses. He could still see the white-shattered crystals from what had probably once been gardens, and here and there the bright cover of a holovid's case, heat-warped and torn.  Even if the mechs had evacuated, even if they'd fled, lives spared; they'd lost everything worth coming home to. They had life, but they'd lost their living.  
  
Ruined, really. There was no other word for it than ruin, and not just the ruin of a city, but lives, dreams, hopes, all crushed under the jagged plascrete, the demented twists of rebar.  One time, he knew, mechs had lived here, intimately: over there, in that mangled bench, maybe confessed to love. And maybe there, under the twisted iron of a fountain, one had wept out his sparkbreak.  The place, when it had walls, had resounded with laughter, anger, passion, sorrow--all the echoes of emotion made manifest.  
  
It was lifeless, now, a lifelessness beyond lifelessness, barren with even the promise of a future gone, as though the ground's very soul had been scarred.  
  
"Dai Atlas."  The voice crackled over his comm, Nova Prime's, tense and excited. Nova enjoyed the war, the fighting, in a way Dai Atlas never had, despite his own skill.  
  
Dai Atlas acknowledged the comm with a word.  He couldn't enjoy fighting: he lacked Nova Prime's surety of purpose, the mech's absolute faith in his cause.  He knew Nova could look at this destruction and see purification, the world swept bare of scraps and stains, ready for a new life, a life of the worthy and strong.  
  
"Your zone has been pacified?"  
  
Another brusque answer, enough to signal assent, without, he hoped, emotion or judgment.  Dai Atlas had believed it, too, up until now, up until this city, one of a dozen they'd 'pacified'.  Pacified.  As though this was Nova Prime's idea of peace.  He couldn't pinpoint what, exactly, made this different, this block, this particular mectare of devastation, just another in a long string of them, block after block after block of destruction.  
  
Maybe it was some mystic number had been reached, maybe he'd finally been filled to surfeit by loss. Death and violence were a soldier's lot, they were what was expected, what was due.  But loss, here, a communal loss, huge and vast, was not part of it, or it shouldn't be.  He was fighting for peace, to bring the long civil war to an end, to usher in the bright dawn of a new Cybertron.  
  
But this place looked like it would never see another dawn, as though the black clouds billowing from the still burning propex storage facilities would never dissipate.  It was hard to imagine life returning here, as though the ground would swallow the echoes of laughter, if any mechs could even bring themselves to the gruesome task of clearing the blasted buildings, picking out the bodies for salvage, clearing the land to rebuild.  
  
Mechs, he thought, skirting around what looked like a dismembered leg, the foot crumpled sideways, flattened by the ankle's gyro, would be rebuilt from the salvage here, bearing parts of the dead with them--this thigh plate, that knee joint, incorporating the memory this destruction into their bodies. It would never leave them, the darkness and damage part of them, part of their daily life.  
  
How do you build a peace from scavenged parts, though? How do you move forward, into life, when so many will have parts of the dead?  
  
He didn't know. All Dai Atlas knew was that that was, suddenly, the most important question in the universe.  
  
And he knew, beyond that, as he threw the gun aside, listening to the stock crack, just one more broken thing among broken things, his mouth in a grimace of despair and loathing, that this was the last war he'd fight.  This was the last he'd ruin in the name of peace, the last futures he'd steal, the last pasts he'd end.  There were no more memories to be made here, except his, except this one.  And its message was clear enough:  
  
Never again.


End file.
